Duplicate Factories of Washington State by The Harmful Free Radicals

The Duplicate Factories of Washington State is result of those sessions plus four years of songwriting, re-recording and editing.

Bill Byrne is an internationally exhibited multimedia visual artist, and college professor who performs wildly experimental electronic and noise music as The Painful Leg Injuries, with his wife Suzanne and as a member of BIOS with Marco Oppedisano and John Ibarra (of El Plan De Aguavodka). Jonah Goldstein is a director who has collaborated with artists such as counterculture icon Crispin Glover, actor Kal Penn and comedy pioneers The Lonely Island, as well as releasing melodic abstract song shards as The Unevenness of the Moon’s Surface. Throughout 2003 the pair met at Byrne’s apartment in Brooklyn, and recorded and arranged song fragments, without a clear direction or intended purpose, just two friends making noise. In 2004 Goldstein returned to Los Angeles, and The Harmful Free Radicals became a long distance project conducted through email, snail-mail and file sharing services. After much back and forth and the decision was reached to turn their core group of eight instrumental sound-scapes into the foundations that the vocals were laid upon. The pair reconvened in 2007 to record the final vocals and add all of the finishing touches.

The result is a marvelous collection of nuanced, idiosyncratic tracks that bare the influence of avant rock pioneers Gastr Del Sol, laptop performer Christian Fennesz and the haunting abstracted songs of David Sylvian’s Blemish. However their influences only tell half to story as these two artists have a unique spin on the future of the pop song. Their bold palette includes Goldstein’s melodic acoustic guitars, Byrne’s circuit-bent instruments, warped field recordings, mandolins, computer generated feedback, trumpets, software based instruments, and meticulously arranged vocals.

Beauty (After Peer Review) opens the album with a lovely bare marriage of guitar and glitch while the concept of attraction is addressed when Byrne’s voice comes in with lyrics derived from the definition of the word “beauty” from Wikipedia with lines from Eddie Murphy’s “Party All The Time”. The First Time I Heard The Word ‘Billabong’ has Dirty-South-style down pitched vocals from Goldstein singing about teenage awkwardness and concludes with a comically over-dramatic chorus. D. Is None Of The Above is a raucous upbeat number with effected voices and digital-meets-analog sounds, it makes the Animal Collective look like choir-boys. The Truth and Toes is the only track here whose roots don’t date back to 2003, recorded during their ’07 session, this anthemic improvised instrumental features the duo playing two very circuit bent keyboards.

This CD-R release marks the latest major release from the Brooklyn-based OKS Recordings of North America label run by Bill Byrne and his longtime collaborator, Jonah Goldstein. OKSRNA specializes in artist created CD-R releases that cater to the tech-savvy listener ready for new arenas of creativity in musical expression.

Average Customer Review: